HBR Emotional Intelligence Boxed Set (6 Books) (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series) by Harvard Business Review
Author:Harvard Business Review
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2017-01-31T15:52:38+00:00
3
The Science
Behind the Smile
An interview with Daniel Gilbert by Gardiner Morse
25
Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert is widely known for his 2006 best seller, Stumbling on Happiness. His work reveals, among other things, the systematic mistakes we all make in
imagining how happy (or miserable) we’ll be. In this
edited interview with HBR’s Gardiner Morse, Gilbert
surveys the fi eld of happiness research and explores its frontiers.
HBR: Happiness research has become a hot topic in the past 20 years. Why?
Gilbert: It’s only recently that we realized we could marry one of our oldest questions—“What
27
Happiness
is the nature of human happiness?”—to our new-
est way of getting answers: science. Until just a few decades ago, the problem of happiness was mainly
in the hands of philosophers and poets.
Psychologists have always been interested in
emotion, but in the past two decades the study of
emotion has exploded, and one of the emotions
that psychologists have studied most intensively
is happiness. Recently economists and neurosci-
entists joined the party. All these disciplines have
distinct but intersecting interests: Psychologists
want to understand what people feel, economists
want to know what people value, and neuroscien-
tists want to know how people’s brains respond to
rewards. Having three separate disciplines all in-
terested in a single topic has put that topic on the
scientifi c map. Papers on happiness are published
in Science, people who study happiness win Nobel prizes, and governments all over the world are
rushing to fi gure out how to measure and increase
the happiness of their citizens.
28
The Science Behind the Smile
How is it possible to measure something as subjective as happiness?
Measuring subjective experiences is a lot easier
than you think. It’s what your eye doctor does
when she fi ts you for glasses. She puts a lens in
front of your eye and asks you to report your ex-
perience, and then she puts another lens up, and
then another. She uses your reports as data, sub-
mits the data to scientifi c analysis, and designs a
lens that will give you perfect vision—all on the
basis of your reports of your subjective experience.
People’s real-time reports are very good approxi-
mations of their experiences, and they make it
possible for us to see the world through their eyes.
People may not be able to tell us how happy they
were yesterday or how happy they will be tomor-
row, but they can tell us how they’re feeling at the moment we ask them. “How are you?” may be the
world’s most frequently asked question, and no-
body’s stumped by it.
29
Happiness
There are many ways to measure happiness. We
can ask people “How happy are you right now?”
and have them rate it on a scale. We can use mag-
netic resonance imaging to measure cerebral blood
fl ow, or electromyography to measure the activity
of the “smile muscles” in the face. But in most cir-
cumstances those measures are highly correlated,
and you’d have to be the federal government to
prefer the complicated, expensive measures over
the simple, inexpensive one.
But isn’t the scale itself subjective? Your fi ve might be my six.
Imagine that a drugstore sold a bunch of cheap
thermometers that weren’t very well calibrated.
People with normal temperatures might get read-
ings other than 98.6, and two people with the same
temperature might get different readings.
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella(8854)
The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy(8508)
Change Your Questions, Change Your Life by Marilee Adams(7372)
Nudge - Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Thaler Sunstein(7242)
The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb(6763)
Deep Work by Cal Newport(6563)
Daring Greatly by Brene Brown(6222)
Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki(6174)
Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio(5961)
Man-made Catastrophes and Risk Information Concealment by Dmitry Chernov & Didier Sornette(5646)
Playing to Win_ How Strategy Really Works by A.G. Lafley & Roger L. Martin(5497)
Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport;(5389)
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert(5351)
The Myth of the Strong Leader by Archie Brown(5237)
The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson(5200)
Discipline Equals Freedom by Jocko Willink(5157)
The Motivation Myth by Jeff Haden(5003)
Stone's Rules by Roger Stone(4857)
The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene(4772)
